[X4U] Cheapest "server" set up?

[Neil Laubenthal]

At 12:53 -0500  on 7/2/05, Anne-Marie Concepcion wrote:
>
>Wow, Neil, thanks, this gives me hope ...
>
>when you say "gave fileshare full permissions to Lurch," what do you 
>mean exactly. Is this a Sharepoints setup thing or is it a Finder 
>thing ... and if it's a finder thing, do you mean that, logged on as 
>"fileshare," you selected the Lurch folder at the root directory, 
>opened Get Info, and set the user, group and Others all to Read and 
>Write? Which "group" was it, if that makes a diff?


I made a user named Fileshare on the fileserver l. . .using the 
Accounts prefpane. Then I went into Sharepoints on the Groups tab and 
created a group named LurchUsers  . . .then put the Fileshare account 
in this group.

Next, go to the Normal Shares on the Sharepoints tab and create the 
share. I selected a sharename of Lurch, set the path to /Lurch, set 
owner to neill (the main admin account on the fileserver), Group to 
LurchUsers, and gave Owner, Group, and Everyone R/W privs.

Now when you mount the server volume from another machine using a 
username of Fileshare to login you get Lurch mounted on the desktop 
with full R/W privs. You then put all the files you want to share 
inside Lurch and anybody can connect to Lurch and 
read/write/add/edit/whatever files.

Nothing goes in Fileshare's home folder . . .you could have set it up 
this way but I didn't.

>>For this . . . I mount it via IP so it's user:password at ip/Lurch . . 
>>. I have set up a static IP on my fileserver for this reason.
>
>The user and password would be the remote Mac's username/password 
>for their own home folder, or would it be the one for user 
>"fileshare" on the server? I'm assuming the latter but just checking.

The one for Fileshare . . .you're connecting to the fileserver so you 
have to use a valid username for the fileserver.

>I think I can get a static IP on the "server" because we're using a 
>switch/hub with NAT. So it'd be something like 192.168.254.105. (the 
>other macs are all the same except for .102, .103, etc.) Does that 
>sound right?

Right . . .The switch/router will assign an IP to each machine. 
Normally this changes from time to time . . .but you can either 
choose a static IP not in the DHCP range that the router is handing 
out and put it in the fileserver . . . or you can use what's called 
MAC address filtering on the router. In this case . . .you go into 
it's settings and tell it to assign IP's via DHCP but to reserve a 
particualar IP for MAC address whatever for the fileserver. You can 
get the MAC address from the Network prefpane under Ethernet tab . . 
. it's called Ethernet ID.

>>I personally wouldn't use a laptop for this purpose . . .I would 
>>use either a Mini or a used G4 for the purpose.
>
>Any reason in particular? Deskspace is at a premium so I don't want 
>a tower and monitor or anything for this thing. Would probably go 
>with a mini, but after small used LCD monitor and keyboard/mouse, 
>it'd cost the same as a used G4 powerbook or ibook.

No real reason I guess . . .just that using a laptop as a server 
seems wrong somehow. It's not really . . .if you set the laptop to 
never sleep and never spin down the hard drive it will work fine for 
light to medium loads (say less than 4 or so users and no 100+ MB 
files). Just make sure you've got an adequate backup scheme in place 
for whatever you do use as the fileserver.

-- 
===================================================================
Neil
There are only three kinds of stress . . .  your basic nuclear 
stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. All of the three are 
related . . . the key is Jello.